King Charles II (90 page)

5
See
A True Relation of the late King’s Death
, by P. M. Dated early march 1685. Printed in full in J. G. Muddiman, ‘The Death of Charles
II
’,
The Month
, 1932. (Not mentioned in Crawfurd, cited above.)

6
Barrillon was told by the Duke of York afterwards that Father Huddleston ‘made the King formally promise to declare himself openly a Catholic if he recovered his health’. But Father Huddleston does not mention this in his own detailed account.
³⁵

7
A saying given its unforgettable expression in Macaulay’s
History of England
: ‘He had been, he said, a most unconscionable time dying; but he hoped they would excuse it.’
³⁷
But the word ‘unconscionable’ is not in the original source.

‘Let his royal ashes then lie soft upon him, and cover him from harsh and unkind censures.’

A
fter the death of King Charles
II
the ordinary people walked about ‘like ghosts’. Roger North wrote that ‘almost every living soul cried before and at his Decease, as for the loss of the best Friend in the World’.
¹
Others felt that they had lost a father, that feeling spontaneously expressed at the King’s death-bed when all present, not only his children, had knelt for his paternal blessing.

The universal application was given its first expression when the King’s body lay in state in the Painted Chamber at Whitehall for several days. As was the custom of the time, his wax effigy, standing upright over the catafalque, dominated the scene. It was dressed in robes of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, and surmounted with an imperial crown of tin gilt, all specially ordered for the occasion by the Lord Chamberlain. Such effigies, taken from the death-mask, often have a haunted look: the lines on the face of Charles
II
are deep, the face is slightly twisted, the expression very sad. Still to be seen exhibited in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, it commemorates the cruel sufferings of his death-bed.

Queen Catharine, as befitted a devout woman who had once been a Portuguese Infanta, understood how to conduct her official position as widow with stately grief. She received the
Ambassadors and other great persons who came to offer their condolences on a vast black bed of mourning. Her whole chamber, from the ceiling to the floor, was hung with black, and lit by innumerable tapers. The callers came thronging and their sympathy was not purely formal: no-one doubted the sincerity of the Queen’s own passion for the King, and besides, she had won universal respect.

One does however detect a firm, even righteous hand, in the way the funeral and other mourning arrangements kept the mistresses at last in their place. The royal concubines were allowed to wear black themselves in their official capacity as ladies-in-waiting, but could not put their households into mourning, a privilege reserved for royal persons. There were other nice distinctions preserved, such as that between the cambric doled out to the Queen’s entourage, while the rest made do with mere muslin. It was not for nothing that the Lord Chamberlain commanded from the Treasury yards of black and white satin for eight escutcheons showing the royal arms of England and Portugal.
²

The funeral itself took place on the night of 14 February. The King’s body was enclosed in a lead coffin – that ‘house of lead’ which had been prophesied – bearing a solid silver plate with an inscription which began: ‘
Depositum Augustissimi et Serenissimi Principis Caroli Secundi
….’ In its last line, ‘
Regnique sui tricesimo septimo
’ (‘in the thirty-seventh year of his reign’), the inscription dated the King’s accession once again from his father’s execution.

Then the body of Charles
II
was laid to rest in a vault beneath the Henry
VII
Chapel in Westminster Abbey. There it remains to this day.
^fn1
Many of the King’s natural children were later buried near him: Charles Earl of Plymouth had already been placed there in his early grave.

Careful provision was made for discreet display – banners of
black taffeta with strings and tassels of black silk – and appropriate sad sound – black-coated trumpeters, kettle-drummers, and a fife. Despite this care, despite the fact that the body was carried under a velvet canopy from the Painted Chamber to Westminster Abbey in a procession headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Norroy, King of Arms, and attended by James
II
, Mary of Modena, various other royalties, nobles and their servants, the rumour has arisen that, in the words of John Evelyn, ‘the King was very obscurely buried’.
⁴

This has sometimes been ascribed to the religious embarrassment caused by the King’s last-minute conversion. The new monarch, it is suggested, did not wish his brother’s body to be buried according to the Anglican rite and did not dare employ the Catholic one. This is also the explanation sometimes given for the fact that James himself stayed away from the burial. The truth is rather less dramatic. Royal interments at the time were traditionally held privately at night, as for example that of the Duke of Gloucester in 1660 and of Prince Rupert in 1682. It was according to custom that the nearest relative stayed away, the role of Chief Mourner devolving upon an officially designated person: in the case of Charles
II
it fell upon the stalwart shoulders of his nephew-in-law, Prince George of Denmark. He was ‘supported’ by the Dukes of Somerset and Beaufort, and ‘assisted’ by sixteen earls – hardly a meagre representation.
⁵

An exception was the state funeral of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, in 1658. Like a coronation, this august ceremony had its own rhythm: it took place three months after his death (both impressing and disgusting Evelyn). The actual burial might even be separate from the State ceremony: Cromwell’s corpse was secretly interred about a fortnight before this took place, because the embalming had failed. Such a magnificent piece of pageantry was mounted with the explicit intention of demonstrating the strength of the regime – in the case of the Cromwellian Protectorate, to bolster its prestige abroad against a young man then known as Charles Stuart. The money spent was crippling: not much less than £50,000.
⁶

Where the late King Charles
II
was concerned, no such demonstration was felt to be necessary. A staid succession was,
surely, to be followed by a steady reign. Above all, there was the question of paying for such pageantry: the monies voted by Parliament for the late King all came to an end with his death, while Charles himself had left large debts. James
II
, faced with a financial crisis and the daunting prospect of a Parliament to solve it, was in no mood for unnecessarily lavish expenditure. The shade of Charles
II
, no stranger to State penury and its ramifications, would certainly have agreed.

The outbreak of verse on the King’s death (including an ode by the Quaker Penn, a tribute to the King’s tolerant spirit, and Otway’s long poem on Windsor Castle, a tribute to his artistic enthusiasm) showed a genuine spirit of lamentation.

Sad was the morn, the Sadder Week began…

was Aphra Behn’s contribution. Two other slightly bathetic starts were as follows:

No more, he’s gone, with Angel’s wings he fled…

and:

O God! Some pity, and I am turned to stone…

All however stressed the state of serenity in which King Charles left his realm. One, by Edmund Arwaker, will serve for many:

The best of Christians as the best of Kings:

By him such Blessings to his Realms were given;

He seemed created for his People’s good…
⁷

So, in a mellow atmosphere of regret the King was buried. It seemed that the peace which he so much desired for his country had fallen upon it, even as he himself was laid to peace in his grave.

It was not to be. Only a few months later those characters dismissed from the stage by the final curtain of one play, found
themselves engaged in quite a different drama. There was to be no happy ending to the reign of King James
II
.

Monmouth died at the executioner’s axe after his foolish and bloody rebellion, only a few months after his father’s death. Three years later James himself was fighting off the political onslaught of William of Orange and his own daughter Mary; the birth of the long-dreaded Catholic Prince to Mary Beatrice in June 1688 had brought disaster in its wake. By 1689 Titus Oates, savagely whipped after trial for perjury in May 1685, was being received by William, now King of England: Oates remained a weather-vane for the direction of the English political wind. As a counter-poise it is good to relate that Father Huddleston lived on to the ripe old age of ninety – protected in the household of Queen Catharine at Somerset House.

Another mercurial figure, whose story had been even more closely entwined with that of Charles
II
, did not survive to see the new Protestant reign. Buckingham had divided himself from the opposition in the King’s last years, unable to remain in accord with Shaftesbury, and had thus been received back into Charles’ favour. On the accession of James, he retired to his great Yorkshire estates, which his friend Etherege complained was like the hero leaving the play at the beginning of the fourth act. But Buckingham’s health was failing, through prolonged dissipation, as it was generally thought. He died two years after his master and childhood friend; but it was somehow characteristic of the man that his burial at least – like that of Charles himself in the Henry
VII
chapel at Westminster Abbey – was a most splendid affair. As for the younger politicians, Sunderland, Rochester, Godolphin and the like, for the most part they stepped willingly onto the new stage to act out all the intricate if not heroic dramas of politics in the ages of William and Mary, and Anne.

The mistresses did not fare so well. Most of their latter ends would have satisfied a Puritan moralist. Nell Gwynn died – of a stroke – two years after her royal Charles. She was only thirty-five. The King’s death had plucked from her at the last minute the coveted title of Countess of Greenwich. She also endured the common struggle of the late King’s pensionaries to secure
those payments she had been promised. At one point she addressed James in language strangely reminiscent of another ill-treated royal servant, Cardinal Wolsey, a character with whom she cannot otherwise be said to have had much in common (perhaps one may attribute the Shakespearean echo to Nelly’s theatrical education): ‘Had I suffered for my God as I have done for your brother and you, I should not have needed either of your kindness or justice to me,’ she told the new King.

In general, James did his best by the mistresses and their children, hampered in his turn by lack of money, but recognizing the duty of their upkeep. He did make the point very firmly to Louise Duchess of Portsmouth that her debts must be paid: but the ladies, like their late protector, remained a byword for negligence. To quote Nelly once more: ‘The King’s Mistresses are accounted ill Paymasters….’
⁸

Barbara Duchess of Cleveland was made of more lasting stuff. She may have lived to regret her own durability. For at the age of sixty-five she married a much younger man, a notorious rake known as Beau Fielding, who treated her abominably; what was more, the marriage itself proved to be bigamous. As for Louise, she survived (in France) to the then remarkable age of eighty-five – the yacht
Fubbs
named in her honour lasted even longer: it was not broken up until 1770.
⁹
She died, wrote Saint Simon, ‘very old, very penitent and very poor’. The Louise who held luxurious court at Whitehall beneath Evelyn’s fascinated gaze would have deplored all three states, but particularly the last.

Catharine of Braganza survived too. It was characteristic of her tenderness that she pleaded with James
II
for the life of Monmouth, who was certainly too desperate to appreciate the irony of his supplication to the childless Queen: ‘Being in this unfortunate condition, and having none left but your Majesty that I think may have some compassion for me; and that, for the last King’s sake …’ In her first widowhood Catharine withdrew to Hammersmith and spent her time amongst the nuns in a convent she had founded there. Later she moved to Somerset House, the palace which belonged by right to a Queen Dowager (Henrietta Maria had also occupied it). She was present at the controversial birth of James
II
’s son, the so-called
Warming-pan Baby, and acted as the child’s godmother; she subsequently bore witness that no act of substitution had taken place. Catharine was still in England at the Revolution of 1688, her return to Portugal having been delayed by a lawsuit against her former Chamberlain. She finally sailed back to Portugal in March 1692, after thirty years spent in England, during which, as Evelyn said: ‘She deported herself so decently upon all occasions … which made her universally beloved.’
¹⁰